“There are no unpaid debts in the universe. The price of an act may be deferred, but it will never be forgotten.”

  [ 12th Lumiran 1749 | Miren | 00:13 | Lenford Estate ]

  Sleep would not come. Nova, curled against my shoulder, slept fitfully, her breath shallow and uneven as if nightmares were unfolding in the depths of her consciousness. Judging by the muffled footsteps in the drawing room, Evelina had already returned. I, meanwhile, was contemplating the structural absurdity of the situation: sleeping in an evening gown, in a single bed with another young woman. According to human social constructs, one is meant to experience a cascade of conflicting emotions in such a moment. I was troubled by only a single thought: how illogical it was to wrinkle expensive silk in one's sleep.

  Outside, something was dripping from the roof—slowly, rhythmically. It wasn’t raining. The monotonous sound beat against my eardrums, making it difficult to concentrate.

  “Nova, wake up,” I whispered, barely touching her shoulder. She only grumbled in her sleep, pressing closer against me. I repeated myself, nudging her slightly. “Nova, get up!”

  Her eyes flew open. For a moment, there was only pure, animal confusion. Then she recoiled, sitting up on the edge of the bed as a faint blush colored her cheeks. “Don’t say a word,” my whisper was cold and precise. I was already at the window.

  Blood was dripping from the roof—black, viscous, and fresh…

  “Nova, we have a problem. Someone has broken into the estate.” “What the…?” her voice was hoarse with sleep. “I told you!” I answered in a low hiss. “Get to Evelina. Move quietly. I hope she’s still alive.”

  We opened the door without a sound. At that exact moment, a piercing shriek echoed from the first floor, cut short by the crash of shattered porcelain. Elizaveta’s scream. A moment later, it died, swallowed by a sudden, ominous silence.

  We slipped into the corridor, trying to move so that not even the creak of a floorboard would betray our presence. The door to Evelina’s room was closed.

  “I’ll open it,” Nova whispered.

  A concentrated beam of Light magic burned two neat holes through the metal hinges. The door gave way, and we slipped through the gap. Evelina was sleeping soundly in her bed, but footsteps were already ascending the stairs—soft, almost weightless, as if someone were treading not on wood but on air itself. Then came the muffled sounds of a brief struggle, and a silent scream, drowned in its own terror.

  Nova rushed to Evelina’s side while I took a position in the doorway. The air before me thickened, weaving itself into a complex pattern: dark, almost black hexagonal plates that absorbed the light were joined by thin, pulsing golden threads, forming the Shield of Order and Darkness before me.

  A sharp impact shook the air. The door flew from its frame, shattering into splinters, and on the other side of my shield, the silhouette of a woman appeared. Her face was hidden behind a perfectly smooth porcelain mask, devoid of slits for eyes or a mouth. A long, flowing violet mantle seemed to drink the light, making her figure appear ghostly and shapeless.

  She tilted her head, as if listening to the vibrations of the world, and in the next second, she launched into an inhumanly fast lunge, intending to cleave me in two with her bare hand. Her strike crashed into the shield. It shuddered, a web of cracks spreading across its surface.

  The assassin froze, swaying her head back and forth like a pendulum. “How curious…” her voice rasped, distorted by the mask until it was unrecognizable. She conjured two translucent daggers from the air. This was not simple magic. This was dream magic, smelling of heady poppies and damp earth.

  A sharp slash—and the shield disintegrated into a thousand dark and golden shards. “Nova, we have to go!” I yelled. Evelina, awakened by the noise, stared in confusion at our guest. “Who is that…” she stammered, and a glacial terror of recognition entered her voice. “They… they’ve come for the heart…” I didn’t wait to hear more. Conjuring a sword of pure Order energy in my hand, I unleashed the Chains of Order upon the woman. But with a light flick of her blade, she shattered them into dust.

  She lunged at me. I barely managed to tilt my head aside—the blade only grazed a lock of hair, which fell silently to the floor. With my other hand, I parried her second blade. She lunged again, and her blade pierced my arm. It was not mere pain. It was a sensation of dissolution. As if a thousand invisible, icy threads had sunk into my flesh and begun to unravel the very fabric of my being from within, severing the bonds that held my form. A foreign, irrational logic had invaded the ideal geometry of my flesh. Blood gushed from the wound, and my arm began to tremble uncontrollably. My heart, betraying me, fluttered in my chest and broke from its usual rhythm, pounding in a ragged tempo alien to my nature.

  She was too powerful; I had to act immediately. I used Eternal Night. A pillar of darkness threw her against the wall, blasting the door to Nova’s bedroom off its hinges. Nova had already thrown open the window, preparing to escape with Evelina through the only available exit, when the woman in the mask whispered from the darkness: “Your celebration is premature…” She slammed her hand on the floor, and the world fractured.

  The walls of the estate became pulsing, living flesh, the color of crimson. From them, with wet, squelching sounds, bony arms began to sprout, grabbing at me, trying to drag me into the bloody mass. The windows transformed into toothed maws that gnashed, ready to grind anyone into a pulp. The air filled with the nauseatingly sweet stench of rotting flesh and heady poppies.

  The woman laughed, and her distorted laughter, laced with the sound of cracking porcelain, tore through the silence. Her body began to change, transforming into a nightmarish creature with a massive, mangled wolf’s head, a long serpentine neck, and clawed paws. It snarled, its head lunging toward me, trying to swallow me whole. The snap of its jaws was nearly upon me. I used Blindness to disorient the thing and leaped back into the drawing room. Nova and Evelina scrambled after me in a panic.

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  The beast, like a titan, moved through the estate, its nightmarish flesh filling all the space. In desperation, Nova unleashed a Firestorm upon it. The furniture ignited, but the beast only roared—the flames did it no harm. “Nova! Don’t use elemental magic!” I shouted. “It’s useless here!” She understood. Her next spell was a Chaotic Burst. Hundreds of rays of Higher Magic shot toward the beast. Her magic of Chaos and Light, capable of shattering stone, was useless here. The rays simply sank into the nightmarish flesh like raindrops in a swamp. For the first time in her life, she felt not like a warrior, but like a terrified child before something that did not obey the laws of the world.

  I seized the moment, activated the Dark Blade technique, and delivered a series of strikes. The creature’s hide was like armor. A huge, clawed paw nearly took my head off. The second one shredded my dress to rags. “Take cover!” I yelled, and Nova immediately created a shield of light. I conjured a Shadow Bomb directly beneath the creature. But the beast struck me with its tail, and I flew like a rag doll into the wall, where the bony arms immediately seized me. The monster’s predatory gaze was fixed on me, but as I felt myself about to be crushed, I activated the bomb. It detonated, and the monster fell through the floor with a guttural croak.

  Nova ran to me, freeing me from certain death, but at that same instant, the space cracked. A new figure appeared in the drawing room, slipping deftly through the chewing maw of a window. He was wrapped in a tattered patchwork cloak, clad in armor made of numerous dark gray leather plates sewn one on top of the other in an asymmetrical pattern, resembling a chitinous carapace. He approached me in sharp, silent movements, a mad grin etched into an old and rusted iron mask.

  His movements were different. Not the irrational terror of the monster, but cold, measured precision. He ignored Nova and Evelina. I was his only target. For a second, it all clicked into place. This chaos was not a single entity. The monster had come for Evelina’s heart. And this one… he was waiting for the right moment to eliminate me. It was not one attack. It was two.

  With a deft movement, the man drew the blade hanging at his hip. And in that same moment, I saw it—one of the Desecrated Blades that had destroyed the Veytra of Order in Illumora. The long, slightly curved blade, forged from a metal not of this world, sliced through the space. The matte edge glinted in the darkness, and the air around it ignited with a crimson-red light, like ripples of heat. My sword of Order energy dissolved instantly, as if its structure had been destroyed from within. Nova tried to attack the stranger, but the man sent her flying with a simple shove. The blow was unnaturally strong, and Nova, losing her balance, flew several meters, crashing into a soft armchair now covered in slime. Evelina screamed, and I scrambled away like a crab, trying to buy myself a few precious seconds. I stretched my hand forward, aiming Eternal Night at him. Blood gushed from my nose, my breath hitched, and bolts of energy shot toward the man. However, his blade simply glowed with a scarlet light, absorbing the entire structure of Order, and the spell dissolved into a thick, smoky veil. I scrambled back further and heard the creak of floorboards and the gnashing of teeth right beside me. The beast was rising with an animalistic snarl from the hole in the floor.

  Immediately rethinking my tactics, I synthesized the magic of Darkness and Earth, and a Shadow Boulder flew straight into the assassin’s stomach the moment he emerged from the veil, now an arm’s length away from me. The man clearly did not expect the spell to work, nor for his blade to fail to react, and did not even try to dodge the magic. The precise strike threw him against the opposite wall, where he was seized by the nightmare’s bony arms. “Nova! Break the wall! We have to run!” I yelled, using Earthquake to buy us a little more time. The estate shook with subterranean rumbles, the furniture began to slide, and even the beast swayed slightly, its pace slowing. The assassin, seeing the beast, hesitated, but then, slicing through the bony arms with his blade, he broke free and lunged at me. He leaped, extending his arm with the blade, aiming for a direct strike to my neck. I merely created an Aether Shield around myself, mixed with shards of ice. The blade clanged, and seizing the moment, I used the Ice Blade spell and pierced his body through. My hand entered his warm flesh. He was just a mortal professional, armed with a cursed weapon. The man’s body convulsed and fell to the floor, dropping the blade. I grabbed the Desecrated Blade but felt it draining my Order, weakening me with every second. “Take it!” I yelled, throwing the blade to Evelina. In a flash, Nova destroyed the wall using a Matter Distortion spell, then grabbed Evelina and the blade and leaped down into an area not consumed by the nightmare. The beast, realizing its feast was about to be cut short, lunged at me with a gnashing of teeth. It was useless to fight it. Wounded and exhausted, I gathered the last of my strength. “Eternal Night,” I whispered. A colossal torrent of darkness and order poured from me. The world swayed for a moment, and I tasted blood and death in my mouth. My shell could not withstand the strain. The blood from my nose intensified, and a veil fell before my eyes. The beast howled and was thrown back, and creating one last shield before the monster’s maw, I rose to my feet and, with my last strength, made a dash downward, leaping from the second story. The pain of the fall shot through my flesh, and an intuitive sob escaped me. They helped me to my feet, and with our last reserves of strength, we fled from the Lenford estate.

  A vast, translucent eye appeared in the sky, exactly like the one on the amulets of the Cult of the Gods of Dreams. It fixed its gaze upon us, as if declaring a mortal feud.

  『 ?? 』━━━???━━━『 ? 』

  [ 12th Lumiran 1749 | Miren | 01:11 | Streets of Sumerenn ]

  When we were far from the site of the catastrophe, a man with a bare torso and crazed eyes emerged from the shadows. He was a few steps from me and began to scratch his face with his nails, leaving bloody trails on his skin. His eyes bulged as if they were about to pop from their sockets, and he rasped: “It will all… repeeeaaat!” “Yooooou… will regreeeeet iiiit!” The man grabbed his hair and began to scream even louder: “Thiiiiis is youuuuur priiiiice… of aaaactiooooons!”

  Evelina, terrified and in tears, clung to Nova. The man drew a blade from his tunic and, with a mad grin at the emptiness, drew the point across his torso, leaving a first, perfectly straight scratch. “A perfect line…!” he whispered with almost childlike delight. Then his face contorted. He began to furiously hack at his own skin, turning the straight line into a chaotic, jagged symbol. “The second world also began with perfect lines…” his whisper was barely audible, but it crawled under the skin, “and then… it all fell apart. Just like now.” The madman continued to carve the symbol of chaos onto his body.

  That was enough. Before he could say anything more, I, without hesitation, ended his torment with a beam of pure Order. The body collapsed onto the wet stone. The message had been delivered—subtle, venomous, and intended only for me. Nova and Evelina stared at me in horror, unable to understand why the incoherent ravings of a madman deserved such a swift and cold execution. In their eyes, for the first time, I saw not only fear of the enemy but also a nascent dread of me—a fear not of the threat, but of my incomprehensible essence.

  “Why did you do that?!” Nova demanded. “Do you truly believe I should tolerate a madman with a dagger near me?” I said coldly. “Arta did the right thing…” Evelina whimpered desperately. “Shh,” Nova whispered, hugging Evelina.

  The adrenaline began to recede. And only then did I feel it—an uncontrollable, humiliating tremor in my body. A delayed reaction of my shell to the overload. I clenched my fists, hiding this weakness from their eyes. We started toward the Biform Palace, through empty streets as if plunged in sleep, under the watch of the eye dissolving in the sky.